PARIS: Access to war-torn Gaza has become increasingly difficult for humanitarian groups, 13 leading NGOs warned on Monday, accusing Israel’s military of blocking much-needed aid from reaching the besieged Palestinian territory.
Denouncing “Israel’s systematic obstruction of aid and its ongoing attacks on aid operations,” the humanitarian organizations said that Israel had facilitated only 53 — less than half — of the 115 relief missions they had planned.
The aid groups slammed what it called Israel’s “siege tactics” in its struggle against Palestinian militant group Hamas.
It said the so-called “humanitarian zone” where most of the strip’s population of 2.4 million people now reside had become “an active combat zone” and “extremely unsafe.”
The charities also criticized the bombing of United Nations schools used as shelters by displaced Palestinians.
At least six schools have been hit over the past nine days.
“These recent events are exacerbating the humanitarian catastrophe at a time when NGOs continue to come up against the obstacles imposed by the continuation of Israeli military operations on the ground,” a press release summarising the 13 NGOs’ views warned.
Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children and the Norwegian Refugee Council were among the charities to contribute to the document.
Since Israel began its ground offensive in the far-southern city of Rafah in May, humanitarian workers have faced major difficulties in delivering aid to the Gaza Strip’s south.
Israel’s capture at the beginning of May of the Rafah crossing, which has since been destroyed, brought aid deliveries to a “complete halt,” the NGOs added.
Tonnes of “absolutely necessary aid” were left blocked at the crossing points in the south “due to the deterioration in security conditions,” the statement said.
More than 1,500 trucks of humanitarian aid containing medicines, first-aid kits and basic necessities were stuck in the Egyptian city of Al-Arish as a result.
Meanwhile, in the north of the Gaza Strip — which has been isolated from the south by the Israeli army — aid delivery is “very limited.”
Oxfam said it took it five weeks to transport just 1,600 food parcels from Jordan to Gaza — a journey it said “should take no more than six hours.”
At Kerem Shalom, designated since May as a priority crossing point for humanitarian aid, the situation had “deteriorated significantly since Israel’s offensive in May,” the aid groups said.
This had made the crossing “unsafe to access from within Gaza and currently not logistically viable.”
Israel denies any famine in Gaza and accuses the United Nations of blocking aid deliveries.
“Yesterday, 211 trucks entered Gaza via Kerem Shalom,” Israeli government spokesman David Mencer said on Monday.
In addition, “eight trucks were collected on the Gaza side” of the Erez along with “103 from the Gaza side of Kerem Shalom,” he added.
The war began with Hamas’s October 7 attack, which resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.
The militants seized 251 hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza including 42 the military says are dead.
Israel responded with a military offensive that has killed at least 38,664 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to data provided by the Gaza health ministry.
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Increasingly hard for aid groups to access Gaza: NGOs
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Increasingly hard for aid groups to access Gaza: NGOs
- Humanitarian organizations said that Israel had facilitated only 53 of the 115 relief missions they had planned
- Aid groups slammed what it called Israel’s “siege tactics”
Turkiye says Israel leading Middle East to ‘total disaster’
He called for an end to the “unlimited aggression” against Iran
ISATANBUL: Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan on Saturday accused Israel of leading the Middle East toward “total disaster” by attacking Iran on June 13.
“Israel is now leading the region to the brink of total disaster by attacking Iran, our neighbor,” he told a summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Istanbul.
“There is no Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, Yemeni or Iranian problem but there is clearly an Israeli problem,” Fidan said.
He called for an end to the “unlimited aggression” against Iran.
“We must prevent the situation from deteriorating into a spiral of violence that would further jeopardize regional and global security,” he added.
Speaking after Fidan, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Western leaders of providing “unconditional support” to Israel.
He said Turkiye would not allow borders in the Middle East to be redrawn “in blood.”
“It is vital for us to show more solidarity to end Israel’s banditry — not only in Palestine but also in Syria, in Lebanon and in Iran,” he told the OIC’s 57 member countries.
The OIC, founded in 1969, says its mission is to “safeguard and protect the interests of the Muslim world in the spirit of promoting international peace and harmony.”
Iran says more than 400 killed since start of war with Israel
- Attacks have claimed the lives of over 400 defenseless Iranians and left 3,056 others wounded
TEHRAN: Israeli strikes on Iran have killed more than 400 people since they began last week, Iran’s health ministry said in an updated toll on Saturday, as fighting raged between the two foes.
“As of this morning, Israeli attacks have claimed the lives of over 400 defenseless Iranians and left 3,056 others wounded by missiles and drones,” health ministry spokesman Hossein Kermanpour said in a post on X.
Erdogan says UNRWA to open office in Turkiye, calls for more support for agency
- Turkiye has called Israel’s assault on Gaza genocide and its move to ban UNRWA a violation of international law
- “We expect our organization and each member state to provide financial and moral support to UNRWA to thwart Israel’s games,” Erdogan said
ANKARA: The United Nations’ Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA will open an office in Ankara, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday, urging Muslim countries to give the agency more support after Israel banned it.
Israel last year banned UNRWA, saying it had employed members of Palestinian militant group Hamas who took part in the October 2023 attacks on Israel that triggered the Gaza war.
Turkiye has called Israel’s assault on Gaza genocide and its move to ban UNRWA a violation of international law, particularly amid worsening humanitarian conditions in Gaza, which has been reduced to rubble with millions displaced.
Addressing foreign ministers of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Istanbul, Erdogan said opening an Ankara UNRWA office would deepen Turkiye’s support for the agency.
“We must not allow UNRWA, which plays an irreplaceable role in terms of taking care of Palestinian refugees, to be paralyzed by Israel. We expect our organization and each member state to provide financial and moral support to UNRWA to thwart Israel’s games,” Erdogan said.
A Turkish diplomatic source said Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan and UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini were expected to sign an accord on the sidelines of the OIC meeting in Istanbul on establishing the office.
Turkiye has given UNRWA $10 million a year between 2023 and 2025. In 2024, it also transferred $2 million and sent another $3 million from its AFAD disaster management authority.
Israel has handed responsibility for distributing much of the aid it lets into Gaza to a new US-backed group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which operates three sites in areas guarded by Israeli troops. The UN has rejected the GHF operation saying its distribution work is inadequate, dangerous and violates humanitarian impartiality principles.
Previously, aid to Gaza’s 2.3 million residents had been distributed mainly by UN agencies such as UNRWA with thousands of staff at hundreds of sites across the enclave.
Israel says killed three Iranian commanders in fresh wave of strikes
- Israel’s military said its fighter jets successfully targeted top Iranian official Saeed Izadi
- It also announced the deaths of two other commanders from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards
JERUSALEM: Israel said Saturday it had killed three Iranian commanders in its unprecedented bombing campaign across the Islamic republic, which Foreign Minister Gideon Saar claimed had already delayed Tehran’s presumed nuclear plans by two years.
Israel’s military said its fighter jets successfully targeted top Iranian official Saeed Izadi, in charge of coordination with Palestinian militant group Hamas, in Qom south of Tehran and announced the deaths of two other commanders from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
As Israel continued to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities and military targets, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said in an interview that by the country’s own assessment, it had “already delayed for at least two or three years the possibility for them to have a nuclear bomb.”
“We will do everything that we can do there in order to remove this threat,” Saar told German newspaper Bild, asserting Israel’s onslaught would continue.
Israel and Iran have traded wave after wave of devastating strikes, after Israel launched its aerial campaign on June 13, saying Tehran was on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon — an ambition Iran has denied.
Israel said it had attacked Iran’s Isfahan nuclear site for a second time after its air force said it had also launched salvos against missile storage and launch sites in central Iran.
The military later said it struck military infrastructure in southwest Iran.
US President Donald Trump warned on Friday that Tehran has a “maximum” of two weeks to avoid possible American air strikes, as Washington weighs whether to join Israel’s unprecedented bombing campaign.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi arrived in Istanbul on Saturday, for a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to discuss the conflict.
Top diplomats from Britain, France and Germany met Araghchi in Geneva on Friday, and urged him to resume talks with the United States that had been derailed by Israel’s attacks.
But Araghchi told NBC News after the meeting that “we’re not prepared to negotiate with them (the United States) anymore, as long as the aggression continues.”
Trump was dismissive of European diplomatic efforts, telling reporters, “Iran doesn’t want to speak to Europe. They want to speak to us. Europe is not going to be able to help in this.”
Trump also said he is unlikely to ask Israel to stop its attacks to get Iran back to the table.
“If somebody’s winning, it’s a little bit harder to do,” he said.
Any US involvement would likely feature powerful bunker-busting bombs that no other country possesses to destroy an underground uranium enrichment facility in Fordo.
A US-based NGO, the Human Rights Activists News Agency, said on Friday that based on its sources and media reports at least 657 people have been killed in Iran, including 263 civilians.
Iran’s health ministry said on Saturday at least 350 people had been killed in the Israeli strikes including military commanders, nuclear scientists and civilians.
Nasrin, 39, who gave only her first name, explained she had been thrown across a room in her Tehran home by an Israeli strike.
“I just hit the wall. I don’t know how long I was unconscious. When I woke up, I was covered in blood from head to toe,” she said as she received treatment at Hazrat Rasool hospital in the Iranian capital.
Traffic police and Fars news agency reported congestion on roads into Tehran on Saturday, indicating some inhabitants were returning to the capital.
Internet access remained highly unstable and limited in Tehran on Saturday, with slow connections and many sites still inaccessible, according to AFP journalists.
Iran’s retaliatory strikes have killed at least 25 people, in Israel, according to official figures.
Overnight, Iran said it targeted central Israel with drones and missiles.
Israeli rescuers said there were no casualties after an Iranian missile struck a residential building in Beit She’an.
At the site of the strike in the north of Israel, mounds of soil had been gouged from the ground and the wall of a ground-floor room destroyed.
Israel’s National Public Diplomacy Directorate said more than 450 missiles have been fired at the country so far, along with about 400 drones.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they had targeted military sites and air force bases.
Western powers have repeatedly expressed concerns about the rapid expansion of Iran’s nuclear program, questioning in particular the country’s accelerated uranium enrichment.
The International Atomic Energy Agency’s chief Rafael Grossi has said that Iran is the only country without nuclear weapons to enrich uranium to 60 percent.
However, it added that there was no evidence Tehran had all the components to make a functioning nuclear warhead.
Grossi told CNN it was “pure speculation” to say how long it would take Iran to develop weapons.
GCC ambassadors raise concern about safety of nuclear facilities amid Israel-Iran conflict
- The ambassadors warned Grossi during a meeting in Vienna about the “dangerous repercussions” of targeting nuclear facilities
- The warning comes after the Israeli military said at one point that it had struck Iran's Bushehr facility, but later said the comment had been made by mistake
CAIRO: Gulf Cooperation Council ambassadors have expressed concerns to UN nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi about the safety of nuclear facilities close to their countries amid the Israeli-Iranian crisis, Qatar state news agency reported on Saturday.
The ambassadors warned Grossi during a meeting in Vienna about the “dangerous repercussions” of targeting nuclear facilities.
The warning comes after the Israeli military said at one point on Thursday that it had struck the Russian-built Bushehr facility, but later said the comment had been made by mistake. Bushehr is Iran’s only operating nuclear power plant, which sits on the Gulf coast.
The potential consequences of an attack on the plant — contaminating the air and water — have long been a concern in the Gulf states.
